GMAT Tutoring For Elite Scores

Earn your target score and achieve your MBA goals with personalized, 1:1 instruction from one of our expert tutors.

Online Instruction by Experienced 99th Percentile GMAT Tutors

You might have noticed other GMAT tutoring services boasting about their “5,000+ practice problems” or their “hundreds of instructor-led videos.”

But do you really want to spend your evenings staring at the computer doing thousands of homework problems?

If you’re like the MBA applicants we know, you are balancing your GMAT study with a demanding job, extracurricular activities, and writing your MBA applications and you want a great score in the shortest possible time. And you probably don’t need remedial instruction in math or grammar, anyway.

We designed our GMAT tutoring exactly for busy students like you. We help you quickly achieve a high score by:

  • Matching you to an experienced GMAT tutor with a 99th percentile GMAT score
  • Preparing for each GMAT tutoring session so we use your time efficiently
  • Assigning official GMAT problems as homework, which prepares you realistically for test day
  • Using practice tests to identify the topics most likely to rapidly improve your GMAT score
  • Focusing our self-study materials on the topics that appear most frequently on the GMAT

Don’t just take our word for it.

Hear from Menlo Coaching Clients

Don’t waste your time and money on ineffective GMAT test prep. Instead, learn why our GMAT tutoring is more effective than the tutoring offered by other companies, along with some of the ways we can help you the most.

Our GMAT Tutors: a 760 GMAT Score Isn’t Bad—for a Start 

Plenty of GMAT tutors did superbly on the test. But that doesn’t mean they’re any good at teaching you their strategies—or at helping you apply them to the toughest GMAT problems. 

The test prep industry is full of test-smart people who are inexperienced teachers.   

We don’t hire their kind. 

Our GMAT tutors are experienced educators first, test whizzes second. We look for tutors with a proven track record coaching students who raised their GMAT scores at least 100 points. 

We even ask each potential GMAT tutor for documentation of their track records that we can check. How? The same way you would—by calling their students. 

No other firm in the test prep industry evaluates potential tutors as rigorously as we do. But that’s just for starters. 

That Infamous Phrase

If you ever worked with a GMAT tutor from a Big Test Prep firm, you might have heard an infamous phrase at the start of your lesson:

“What shall we work on today?” 

Trust us—nothing optimal ever develops from a private GMAT tutoring session that starts this way.

Why? Experience demonstrates that GMAT students typically make lousy judges of which strategies and concepts yield the largest score gains on the GMAT. 

Think about it: How could someone with limited GMAT familiarity ever know which topics the Graduate Management Admissions Council tests most frequently? Or which strategies solve the broadest range of GMAT problems most efficiently?

They can’t know. It takes a GMAT tutor years of experience to understand the trends and nuances among GMAC’s difficult test questions. That’s why GMAT students are usually the people who would least understand how best to allocate their tutoring time. 

Proprietary GMAT Tutoring Process 

The greatest value an experienced private GMAT tutor delivers stems from their experience teaching the highest expected value strategies and concepts each individual student needs to master. 

To do that, our GMAT tutors employ a proprietary structured process that’s taken our test prep vice president Chris Kane nearly 20 years to develop and refine. His process encompasses three main components: 

  • Diagnostics. Our diagnostic evaluation rapidly assesses your proficiency with the GMAT strategies that matter most. Using proprietary methods, including practice tests, we swiftly identify which high-value topics you need to master, and even pinpoint precise practice questions and solved problems your tutor can recommend that will help you the fastest.
  • Priorities and Sequencing. The diagnostic results help your tutor create a study plan that ranks and optimizes your learning priorities, and determines the sequence of the topics to target during your lessons. 
  • Individual Syllabus. Based on the priorities and sequence, your GMAT tutor develops a written study plan, customized just for you. It serves as a behavioral contract that gives the tutor permission to hold you accountable for completing your assignments on schedule. Students with demanding jobs or unpredictable travel schedules especially appreciate this accountability support. 

Changing Your Paradigm

Through this proprietary process, Chris and the team at Menlo are on a mission to change your paradigm about the value students should expect from a great private GMAT tutor. Students like you deserve that value because, after all, you’re paying for it. And you shouldn’t settle for anything less.

Chris Kane, VP of Test Prep at Menlo Coaching

Learn more about Chris

The team takes that mission seriously. According to Chris:

“In my experience since 2000, far too many students have been willing to let their GMAT tutors get away with acting like slackers. If you think about it, private tutors who passively expect students to ask for topics and bring in all the test items result in the students’ doing extra work they should never be doing.

“Compliant and enabling tutors like these do their students a disservice because this practice can actually lower their overall GMAT scores by distracting them with suboptimal expected-value strategies and concepts. It’s a major reason you find so many tutors whose students don’t perform as well as they should on the exam. Private GMAT tutors like these don’t recognize that such an unstructured approach fails to align with well-known pedagogical best practices that optimize the effectiveness of the tutoring process.

“Instead, it’s the professional responsibility of the tutor to structure each student’s optimal curriculum and learning plan, and to adjust it to reflect a student’s progress. That function is not the responsibility of the students; they shouldn’t be doing that work. It’s just not their job.

“Outside of the GMAT tutoring team we’re building here at Menlo Coaching, I’m not aware of any other GMAT tutoring program within the industry that currently offers students such a structured and comprehensive proprietary process. Because 98 percent of GMAT tutors still fail to work our way, Menlo’s proprietary process could very well disrupt the test prep industry. Besides, our process might appear innovative, but it’s not entirely new. I based this process on a consistently effective approach that I’ve applied in my work as an expert GMAT tutor over the past 20 years, and plenty of outstanding reviews online from all my students prove that effectiveness.”

Meet Our Expert GMAT Tutors

Hailey Cusimano, MBA
Director of Tutoring

Hailey emphasizes a strategy-driven approach to GMAT preparation centered around each student’s unique background and learning style. She takes a structured approach to GMAT coaching that constantly recalibrates in response to student performance. This technique has allowed Hailey’s students to stomp out stubborn plateaus and achieve top-tier scores in as little as a few hours.

Learn more about Hailey

Ron Awad
Ron Awad
GMAT Tutor since 2011

Since first preparing for the GMAT in 2007, Ron has been passionate about GMAT minutiae, converting his love of tutoring students into a full-time career in collegial education. Specifically, with a decade of private GMAT tutoring experience at this level, he has seen the structures and traps employed time and again by the GMAT to snare students. And Ron can show you how to avoid these traps efficiently.

Learn more about Ron

Dave de Koos
GMAT Tutor since 2016

Throughout his 12 years of university-level teaching experience, Dave has come to realize that the key to mastering the GMAT is to gain a deep understanding of the fundamentals being tested and not to focus on tricks. His teaching style helps students to break down complex problems into simple, manageable pieces so that the concepts can be understood at a fundamental level and solutions can reveal themselves.

Learn more about Dave

Travis Morgan, MBA
GMAT Tutor since 2007

Travis brings more than a dozen years of experience of private tutoring for the GMAT, GRE, and Executive Assessment exams, and he’s seen it all. An award-winning instructor, he has worked with hundreds of test takers across multi-student classrooms and individual tutoring. While Travis has helped students with starting GMAT scores ranging from the 200s to the 700s, his expertise lies in identifying the underlying causes for score plateaus and helping students break through them.

Learn more about Travis

David Baird, IMBA
GMAT / GRE Tutor since 2001

Over his 20+ year teaching career, David has acquired more than 10,000 hours each teaching and tutoring for both the GMAT and GRE exams. As a result, he has become an expert in the industry, with his sole focus being improving the lives and future careers of all his tutoring students. David now focuses his private tutoring on assisting world-class MBA candidates applying to top-tier MBA programs in achieving the highest possible score on the GMAT exam.

Learn more about David

Craig Cartier - Menlo Coaching GMAT Tutor
Craig Cartier
GMAT / GRE Tutor since 2007

Through over a dozen years teaching the GMAT and GRE, Craig has seen that the best outcomes result not only from focusing on mastery of fundamentals, but also from understanding the importance of test strategy, timing strategy, and having a systematic (and positive) approach to studying.  With this in mind, he aims to deeply understand the test skills of every student he works with, to better understand what mix of preparation will lead him or her to an ideal score.

Learn more about Craig

Chris Speck
GMAT Tutor since 2014

For the past 9 years, Chris has guided hundreds of students through the fundamentals and nuances of the GMAT, and he enjoys asking a lot of questions in order to get students to engage with the material, instead of letting them passively take in information. Whether you are just starting out with the content or are trying to get those last points to earn a 99th-percentile score, Chris will identify any sticking points that are holding you back and will teach you how to overcome them.

Learn more about Chris

Mike Butville, M.B.A.
GMAT Tutor since 2007

Mike studied Engineering at M.I.T., worked as a Nuclear Engineer, and successfully got into Harvard Business School while still in the Navy—in short, he knows how important it is to maximize your valuable time! That’s why Mike emphasizes efficiency in his work as a GMAT tutor: he’ll help you identify the skills that will yield the most “ROI” for score improvement, and which drills or problem assignments are most efficient to strengthen those areas. (But he also has a great sense of humor and makes each session engaging – and he may even throw in an occasional Simpsons quote or 90’s movie reference.)

Learn more about Mike

Packages and Pricing

All tutoring packages include complete access to the Menlo Coaching GMAT curriculum:

  • “Refresh Module” PDFs that efficiently cover the content needed to solve Quantitative and Verbal problems: Arithmetic, Critical Reasoning, Algebra, Word Problems, Sentence Correction, Geometry and Statistics
  • 12 lessons containing proprietary strategies for solving tough problems quickly: Intro to the GMAT, Arithmetic, Algebra, Word Problems, Geometry & Statistics, Data Sufficiency, Critical Reasoning 1, Critical Reasoning 2, Sentence Correction 1, Sentence Correction 2, Reading Comprehension, and the Analytical Writing Assessment
  • Homework assignments highlighting the most important problems from GMAC’s official guides
  • 35 hours of recorded GMAT instruction from our online course
  • A study schedule showing you how to use the official GMAC practice tests as part of your preparation for test day
  • Self-hypnosis recordings to help you overcome procrastination and the test anxiety sometimes triggered by a computer-adaptive test

Because the GMAT is one of the factors considered when MBA admissions committees award merit-based scholarships, numerous Menlo Coaching GMAT students have gone on to win $60,000, $100,000 or even full-tuition scholarships after first achieving a great GMAT score.

Interested in the GRE?  Click here for more information.

Basic Package
(10 Hours)

$380 / hour

  • For students 50-80 points from their target score
  • Work on several areas, including content and strategy

Standard Package
(14 Hours)

$350 / hour

  • For students early in their study
  • Focus on multiple subject areas, plus test-taking strategy and time management

Comprehensive Package
(20 Hours)

$330 / hour

  • For students new to the GMAT
  • Build a strong foundation and learn strategies and approaches for every question type

Work Directly with Our Head of Test Prep, Chris Kane

Chris Kane, GMAT Tutor since 2004

Students can purchase tutoring with Menlo Coaching’s GMAT curriculum creator and Head of Test Prep, Chris Kane. Chris has been tutoring one-on-one and leading group courses since 2004. By working directly with Chris, you’ll benefit from his long experience teaching and deconstructing GMAT problems and his intimate knowledge of the Menlo Coaching curriculum.

10-20 Hour Packages

$450 / hour

We do not offer larger packages up front because most of our clients already achieve excellent GMAT score improvements within 20 instructional hours or fewer. If you need additional hours, we can add those for you later at the equivalent package rate. For GMAT students requiring extensive remedial instruction a larger package is available after consultation with a tutor to be sure that such a package is actually required.

We also offer GMAT prep courses if you feel like you could benefit from a group classroom environment.

Frequently Asked Questions About Menlo Coaching’s GMAT Tutoring Program

Who would benefit most from your private GMAT tutoring?

Four groups of GMAT examinees should consider private tutoring. These groups aren’t mutually exclusive; some examinees fall into more than one of the following categories. You might be one of them.

Examinees Who Needed a Good GMAT Score—Yesterday

The first group includes those who need a good GMAT score as soon as possible. For students who don’t have at least two to three months for one of our prep course sections, our private GMAT tutoring offers an ideal option. Learn about our GMAT prep scheduling alternatives in the FAQ below titled Which should I choose: your GMAT prep course or GMAT tutoring program? Help me decide.

GMAT Prep Course Students

Second, Menlo Coaching students currently enrolled in our GMAT prep course who would like more practice than the course offers should consider tutoring. As we explain below, even a few sessions with one of our private GMAT tutors can amount to a worthwhile score-boosting investment.

Examinees who Seek to Surpass Their Good GMAT Score

Third, we frequently work with students who already scored well during previous GMAT attempts, but they seek to raise their scores even higher.

Now, why would an examinee who already scored at least a 700 on the GMAT try for an even higher score? Two very compelling reasons exist:

They want to win admission at an M7 school, or they need a scholarship.

M7 Applicants

The M7 comprises the world’s most popular business schools. Each year, more candidates apply to these “Magnificent Seven” business schools than to any others around the world.

The M7 includes:

  • Harvard University: Harvard Business School
  • Stanford University: Graduate School of Business
  • University of Pennsylvania: Wharton School
  • Northwestern University: Kellogg School of Management
  • University of Chicago: Booth School of Business
  • Columbia University: Columbia Business School
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT Sloan School of Management

Only minor differences exist in the GMAT averages among MBA students enrolled in these programs. Other things equal, these super-elite schools prefer GMAT scores from their applicants roughly in the range of 720 to 740. And believe it or not, some of their MBA admissions committees seek even higher scores from certain categories over-represented within the applicant pool.

Why? That’s because when evaluating candidates who represent categories flooded with a glut of applicants, such an admissions committee can afford to be even more selective when considering GMAT scores.

For example, our sense is that these committees probably need about a 750 GMAT score to justify admitting MBA applicants such as:

  • Candidates with work experience within the private equity industry. That’s not only because a generous supply of these applicants exists, but also because they usually attended an Ivy League university and passed the investment banking interview processes. They are almost always excellent test takers.
  • International applicants without United States citizenship who hold undergraduate engineering degrees granted by universities outside the U.S.

Although GMAT scores that average about 730 might at first sound stratospheric, many fail to realize that with instruction of the calibre we provide, a score that high is definitely within range for most examinees who had scored between about 650 and 700 during an earlier GMAT attempt.

Scholarship Applicants

In addition, these days many student debt-conscious MBA applicants seek to raise their scores in order to maximize their chance of winning scholarships. This trend applies to candidates applying across all MBA programs, and not just at the top ones. Nevertheless, a high GMAT score is especially likely to win a scholarship offer from a top business school that’s known to “buy” high GMAT scores to fortify its U.S. News and World Report ranking.

Learn more about how average GMAT scores drive modern MBA rankings in our popular article, What is a Good GMAT Score?

Students with Skill Challenges

Fourth, some students seek to shatter the 700 barrier, but they experience skill challenges with one or more of the critical subjects required for strong GMAT performance. In many cases, that’s because the quality of a student’s pre-college education negatively impacts their GMAT preparation and performance.

Of particular concern are the students for whom the quality of their education in critical subjects was suboptimal during primary or secondary school. On the GMAT, critical subjects include:

  • Arithmetic
  • Algebra
  • Geometry
  • Statistics
  • English reading comprehension
  • English grammar and composition

Common reasons this might have happened include:

  • The faculty or school teaching these critical subjects fell below standards.
  • A student experienced persistent emotional, social, family or health challenges while taking critical coursework.
  • A student learned English as a second language outside of an English-speaking nation like the United States or the United Kingdom. Often the language skills of such students are not competitive with most GMAT examinees because they did not take college courses in English writing and literature in an English-speaking country. As a result, the degree of precision required to correctly solve GMAT verbal reasoning questions supersedes these students’ English proficiency.

Scoring well on the GMAT is certainly feasible for students motivated to aggressively overcome skill deficits in these critical subjects. However, for a student experiencing challenges with a critical subject like algebra, effective GMAT preparation will require more time, effort, and resources. What’s more, this preparation may be overly challenging or impractical without capable and comprehensive tutoring support like ours.

For that reason, we recommend tutoring to any GMAT examinee with such a skill challenge who seeks a 700-plus score. Typically, tutoring will emphasize the key topics identified by our proprietary diagnostic evaluation at the start of our tutoring program. We will then use our underlying resources to allow guided self-study to improve the rote skills, followed by one-on-one help tailored to the student’s learning style for the harder concepts.

Why do your tutoring assignments and exercises emphasize genuine GMAT resources?

Discover why our GMAT program emphasizes GMAC’s official resources by reviewing our GMAT prep course web page. There you’ll find explanations in two sections:

  • Dirty Little Secret #1: Big Test Prep has a nasty habit of relying on inauthentic study materials and practice exams that don’t prepare students for the real GMAT
  • Frequently Asked Questions: What’s the difference between your GMAT prep services and those your competitors offer?
What’s the minimum number of tutoring hours likely to significantly boost my GMAT score?

Although every student is unique, in general we recommend at least ten hours of tutoring.

For most students, reviewing results from the diagnostic evaluation along with their proposed syllabus requires much of the first session. Moreover, our experience suggests it’s unlikely that a typical student would complete and review with their tutor enough high-value exercises during fewer than ten hours that would substantially boost their GMAT score. For these reasons, our minimum GMAT tutoring package comprises ten instructional hours.

Which should I choose: your GMAT prep course or GMAT tutoring program? Help me decide.

If you have read through our web pages but still aren’t certain, two factors should help you choose: Time and investment.

Time and Scheduling Factors

Scheduling is more of a factor for our prep course. Realistically, prep courses work best for students who have more time available. And typically, students in our GMAT courses need at least two to three months before they plan to sit for the GMAT.

Why? Our courses meet for five weeks. During 2021, five of these courses appear on our calendar. Recordings are available, but students should try to attend as many live sessions as possible, because live interaction with the instructor and fellow students is so important.

Furthermore, for a number of good reasons, usually we don’t permit students to join the course while it is in process later. So, working backwards, you’ll need enough lead time before your planned exam date to schedule all 35 hours of your course sessions, followed by at least 4 weeks to do numerous timed question sets and practice tests, as well as important review from the course sessions.

By contrast, scheduling for tutoring is more flexible. For example, students who for one reason or another have to take the GMAT in only three to four weeks pretty much need to rely on tutoring, because our courses run for five weeks. And even though our tutors have busy schedules, our tutoring sessions are usually easier to schedule than the prep course, which is much less flexible.

Investment and Value Factors

Now, let’s consider how the investments required for our GMAT prep course and tutoring compare.

As we point out on our GMAT prep course web page, our class is a great value because it’s a cost-effective solution. We price the prep course competitively on a per-instructional-hour basis, and we sell the course for a flat fee that makes budgeting straightforward.

And as we also emphasize on that page, our course can save you time and money—and in some cases, lots of time and money. That’s because the GMAT course provides a conceptual framework in an organized, systematic way that prevents most students from needing extensive private tutoring afterward. Furthermore, many students find that when they have questions, they can rely on collaboration with classmates through our discussion forums and learning management software, to which we provide access for course participants at no additional charge.

To compare, we sell our private tutoring on a per-hour basis. But for most students, tutoring will be a variable cost, meaning that the total cost varies according to how much time a student will need.

For example, students who had first finished our GMAT prep course tend to require the least tutoring (6+ hours). However, if a student did not or could not enroll in one of our prep course sections, comprehensive GMAT preparation through our tutoring program would typically cost that student much more than the GMAT prep course’s flat rate—plus any additional tutoring after the course.

Our experts couldn’t precisely predict how many tutoring hours you might need until after you completed our diagnostic evaluation, which is the first phase of our GMAT tutoring program. However, they’d welcome chatting with you informally to roughly estimate how many hours you may need. That’s always a free consultation, so there’s no reason for you not to chat with one of our tutors to discover how much time they believe would result in a good outcome for you on the GMAT, and to learn about answers to other questions you’d like to ask.

How is your tutoring delivered? Online or in-person?

Nearly all of our students opt for online GMAT tutoring, which is safe, flexible and saves you the time it would take to commute to our offices. We use the Zoom and Adobe Connect systems to deliver our tutoring.

By offering our tutoring online, we are able to work with students all across the US.

In-person GMAT tutoring can be provided upon request; inquire for details.

GMAT® is a registered trademark of the Graduate Management Admission Council™. Menlo Coaching is neither endorsed by nor affiliated with GMAC.